The Trans-Pacific Partnership: It’s Free Trade on Steroids

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a treaty involving 12 nations, essentially an expansion of “free trade,” the “Trojanhorse” of multinational and globalist interests. The planned treaty consists of 29 chapters, only five of which deal with trade, not unlike the NorthAmerican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that comprises two entire books and over1,000 pages of text.

TPP will encompass 40% of the world’s GNP. It is estimated that 600 multinational corporations co-authored the plan, which isconsidered the largest planned international treaty ever considered in world history.

The treaty will cover international relationshipswith banks, the Internet, labor and the healthcare sector, as well as the environment.

No portion of TPP has been released to thepublic by its authors. Congressmen have been allowed to read it, but are required tosubmit any notes taken for review by U.S. trade officials. No one outside the 600 multinationals has a full copy. We know this from the three chapters revealed by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the major drumbeater for TPP. The chamber claims that TPP will increase trade and employment, improveinfrastructure and do many other things. Proof of the assertions is sadly missing, however, and theevidence is contrary. TPP benefits multinational corporations and nothing else.

Free trade treaties—actually, to this date, theyhave been called agreements—are a national scandal demonstrated by NAFTA, the deleteriousresults of which include 11.7 million lost blue-collar jobs, 57,000 small business closures (my corporationincluded) and an annual trade surplus of $5.7 billion with Mexico turned into a $56 billion deficit.

The fact that TPP is intended as a treaty makesthings much worse. If TPP is passed by Congress it becomes part of constitutional law and Americanchallenges to any segment of the treaty will have to be approved by all signatories, i.e., all 12nations that signed onto TPP, and require a two-thirds majority in Congress to change it. This makes modification, challenge and change to thetreaty virtually impossible.

If enacted TPP will destroy family businesses and farms with multinational corporations overtaking all production.

Hello, New World Order!

A large portion of the intended treaty deals with the Internet, regulating what service providers must collect, what content shall be allowed,and how it will be regulated. Currently, the U.S. controls ICANN—the body that regulates theInternet—but that is planned to be terminated and the Internet become controlled by an international body. This will likely mean the end to netneutrality, the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment.

Local and national labor, marketing, distributionand sales regulations will be terminated and replaced by regulations laid out in TPP. Protectionof domestic industries will be terminated, and there will be no protective duties or tariffs.

A local American producer will be forced tocompete with any producer of the 12 signatories to TPP as well as the six of NAFTA and the CentralAmerican Free Trade Agreement. Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore,Vietnam and U.S.A. (18 nations) will join the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, ElSalvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in benefiting from unfair free trade with the United States.

These free trade agreements have alreadyresulted in 10 years of annual trade deficits totaling over $4 trillion. Put moreclearly, for 240 months, we have as a nation imported more than we export.

We additionally have free trade agreementswith Panama and South Korea.

Let me simplify this: If TPP is enacted,the U.S. will have in place treaties and agreements with 20 nations, every one ofwhich, except for Canada, has lower wages, fewer regulations and fewer or no labor protections—and America’s manufacturingindustries are supposed to compete with them based on production, regulatory and environmental regulationsthat make manufacturing in America from one to 80 times more expensive?

The plan simply is to eliminate small andfamily-owned business, long the bane of multinationals, and turn control of the world economyover to 600 multinational corporations.

Governments love this idea. Multinational corporations are large like governments, inefficient and generally do not develop new products, servicesor inventions, but steal them from smaller firms that produce them.

In the chapters of TPP that have been leakedto the public, we learn of a peculiar provision in the plan to stifle competition. Assuming thatsome governmental authority decided to build or grant to a business a toll bridge over a river, but aprivate contractor owned a highway bridge nearby, under TPP that contractor can sue the government for loss of business. This would equallyapply to healthcare facilities, hospitals or sports stadiums. It is nothing but protection from competitionfor existing large businesses.

Examining the basic concept put forward by progressives is the theory that through the increase of interdependence between nationsthrough the liberalization of trade and elimination of tariffs and duties, the world will become morepeaceful because we will all be dependent upon each other. This concept has no credibility at all. It is a theory that has over time been provenwrong.

Mexico has demonstrated a worsening relationship with America, as has China, and we have trade agreements with both of them. All that thishas produced is loss of American manufacturing, loss of blue-collar employment and drastic increasesin trade deficits.

Let me be very clear here: Any nation that produces year-on-year trade deficits will at some point see the erosion of value in their currencies.Any nation that does not manufacture becomes the colony of the nation that does. The ultimatecost of continued deficits is monetary inflation, or a continuation of ever-rising prices. Real U.S. inflation is about 10.7% annually not the Disney Worldon the Potomac claim of 1.7%.

Why? The average wages in America andCanada are about $32.50 per hour. Compare that to China, which is $0.75, India at $0.81, Mexico at$4.04, Japan at $27.80, South Korea at $16.20, or Singapore at $ 18.72. Switzerland, with the highesthourly wage of $43.28, also has the lowest unemployment rate, because most employment is super high-skilled.

In crass terms, manufacturing costs can be separated into labor, raw materials and government costs. Of these, raw materials are in most casesthe lowest portion, and labor is the highest. For this reason many manufacturing enterprises farmout labor-intensive portions of production to places where costs, especially labor, are lower and government regulations fewer.

Beginning with the maquiladora programs inMexico that pre-dated NAFTA, American manufacturers transferred well over 2 million jobssouth of the border, and that’s just in the automotive, TV and radio industries.

In case you have not noticed, America, whichinvented television, no longer makes the machines.

Instead of addressing this problem, Washingtonclaims that TPP will offset China’s huge trade imbalance with America. In reality, though, it willdo no such thing. The ultimate outcome of TPP will be a shift of trade imbalance from China toAsian TPP members.

The U.S. has reached a point where we are so dependent on Japan, South Korea and China that we are no longer able to produce military hardwareto supply our defense needs. TPP will expand this dependency.

It’s worth noting that no other nation is so dependentupon foreign suppliers as is America.

International trade is simple. We purchasegoods overseas, and foreigners collect dollars based on what they sell. Currently, the U.S. setsthe value of the dollar, because it is the international reserve currency, but this will soon end.The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency—which will force American businesses to purchase goods in other currencies—combinedwith TPP will likely mean the end of America and the beginning of an international multinationalbusiness cartel controlling 40% of the world’s economy.

TPP has nothing to do with trade, free or otherwise.TPP is an instrument to eliminate competition from the multinationals and to once againjack up their profit margins at the expense of the American middle class.

All of this smells of Obamacare and its 20,000pages of rules and regulations. The infamous words of Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) come tomind in this case, when she said in reference to Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that we can find out what is in it.”

Dr. Adrien Krieg was on the District Export Council in Connecticut and Rhode Island, an international trade advisory body tothe Department of Commerce, for 15 years spanning the Reagan administration to the Clinton administration. He was opposed toNAFTA from its proposal days. Having lived in Mexico, he was well informed about how business is conducted in that country.

Most important issue happening today. Thanks to Bill Clinton’s telecommunications deregulations in the 1990s, we are now left with just SIX gigantic multinational corporations controlling 80% of ALL media in the nation. This makes the job of hiding the globalist agenda all the easier and explains why the television “news” ignores the subject of “free” trade.

I agree that there will be job losses, but I don’t agree that this will weaken the dollar. After all, the same multinationals who will shift their jobs to Asia will still be dealing in dollars and bringing it back home. Also, there is no way a cash-strapped Asian company will be able to compete with multinationals.

The TPP is nothing less than a social and political coup, but a slow one that no one expects, no one is willing to stop and no one will recognize until it’s too late. That’s often how it is when entire systems of power shift. We went from city-states to empires to nations…but there it stopped. No one could figure out how to conquer many nations one by one and make it stick. All the while, capitalism spread and wealth became more and more concentrated. The TPP is nothing more than one of the culmination of that process.

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